[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 151 (Tuesday, September 20, 2022)]
[House]
[Pages H7999-H8003]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             ECONOMICS 101

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2021, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, forgive my getting organized. The floor 
has been moving a little faster than we expected.
  Mr. Speaker, I am going to try a couple of things and try not to bore 
everyone out of their minds over the next hour. Some of what I am going 
to touch on is going to be a little technical. Part of it is really 
cranky.
  I have a number of different boards, and they are going to try to hit 
different points in different orders. I will beg of staff, help me sort 
of get them all stacked up right here, if we could.
  First thing, I want to go to geek town for a moment. Just to put this 
in perspective, I have come to this floor since January talking about 
inflation. Now, how many of you remember the discussions we were all 
having--actually, it would be more had at us--that inflation was 
transitory. Now, they sort of apologize--the Federal Reserve, the 
Treasury Secretary Yellen, hopefully the White House, though the White 
House seems to be disconnected from reality--that it is not transitory.
  If you saw the numbers that came out last Thursday, Friday, we have 
something called structural. What does that mean to anyone? Does this 
place even care to understand?
  First, let's do the first bit of geeky. When you hear a discussion 
that the yield curve is inverted, how many of you immediately reach 
over to your television and say, ``Oh, God, I have the wrong channel 
on,'' and turn it off? It is not that complicated. It is a way of 
people using big words to try to sound smart.
  Inverted yield curve just means, hey, I expect over the next 2 years 
to have higher inflation so the value of my dollar goes down faster 
than I do over the 10 years.
  That means if I buy a 10-year bond, I might be willing to take an 
interest rate here, but I expect inflation to be so high in the next 2 
years, I want a higher interest rate because, theoretically, it is real 
simple: When things take longer, you should have more risk and, 
therefore, want a higher interest rate.
  Why is this important to a conversation on the floor of the House? Go 
look on your favorite financial website right now. The 2 years has a 
higher interest rate than the 10 year. The 5 years has a higher 
interest rate than a 10 year. The 7 year has a higher interest rate 
than the 10 year. That is the markets telling you that they expect 
inflation to be with us for years.
  You also saw in the inflation report we received last week, you saw 
my brothers and sisters on the left: Hey, energy prices are down--yay. 
Oh, why is the core inflation so high?
  Congratulations, you did it. Functionally, 30 years of substantial 
stability in inflation, and we got ourselves a wage-price spiral. We 
dumped, in March 2001, so much money into the economy that it set off 
what is called a wage-price spiral. Wages go up; you have to raise your 
prices. Well, if you raise your prices, you have to pay your workers 
more. If you pay your workers more, you have to raise your prices.
  What happens when that becomes embedded into the structure of the 
economy and energy goes up and down? And how many of our friends on the 
left keep saying, ``Well, it is Ukraine''? Of course, if you remove 
energy prices, you still have inflation built into the core.

                              {time}  1515

  This is really, really horrible, dangerous, and brutal.
  Does anyone here give a damn about poor people?
  Does anyone here care about the working middle class?
  Does anyone care about people trying to retire?
  Mr. Speaker, you have got to understand the brutality.
  Because where does that money go?
  I am going to show some boards here. I represent the Phoenix-
Scottsdale area. I have the highest inflation in the continental United 
States. I am still trying to figure out why Alaska has an urban zone 
that is higher than mine. But functionally I have the highest inflation 
in the country.
  If you live and work in my community and did not have a pay hike--I 
am going to show it, and you are going to hear this multiple times--you 
now work for a month and a half for free, Mr. Speaker.
  This place functionally taxed you. One month and a half of your labor 
has been stripped from you. And the money doesn't disappear. What 
happens is your wages become worth less purchasing, but that wealth 
transfer from you, Mr. Speaker, is actually a form of tax because the 
$30 trillion over here of borrowed money your government has, actually 
now it gets to be paid back with dollars of less value.
  Whether you know it or not, Mr. Speaker, if you are my neighbor in 
the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, you have been taxed out of a month and a 
half of your wages. And thank you. You helped to actually buy down the 
U.S. debt because borrowers benefit from inflation, but people trying 
to save, people getting ready to buy a home, getting ready for 
retirement, and people just trying to survive get crushed.
  So if you had listened to the floor the last couple of days, Mr. 
Speaker, how many times have you had someone come to this floor and 
actually show they even care?
  No. We will give some great speeches about: Hey, 50 illegal crossers 
of our border got shipped to Martha's Vineyard. Ooh.
  Come to my State. That is like every few minutes. I am a border 
State. Come down to Yuma with me, Mr. Speaker, and let me show you what 
the hell is actually going on.
  But in Washington, D.C., I am still waiting for my brothers and 
sisters on the left to come behind these microphones and apologize for, 
functionally, what is the biggest tax in U.S. history. We are now 
rivaling what happened to this country in the late seventies and very 
early eighties, except the crisis is much more complex now.
  Here is why: Yes, you had the wage spirals, the price spirals, and 
the fuel spirals of the late seventies, but we had a beneficial 
demographic. We had lots of available workers.
  Today, we have this crazy thing going on where our available work 
population because of our demographics--my fear is the Federal Reserve 
is going to have to break the back of employment in this country to 
squeeze out inflation.
  Are we all ready for that?
  Because we Republicans in this legislature and in this Congress have 
come behind these mikes multiple times--I have introduced legislation 
and said, Look, what is inflation?
  Inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods.
  You can do one of two things. You can squeeze the dollars out of 
society so all that free money the Democrats gave away over the last 
couple years will raise interest rates, pull liquidity out, and take it 
away; or we could make more stuff.
  I am going to show a couple of boards here of what has happened to 
productivity in the last couple of quarters. We are crashing. Our 
productivity is crashing. So when you do the fancy math, Mr. Speaker, 
and you are not making more stuff, it means what the Federal Reserve is 
going to have to do to us is more and more brutal. And I think actually 
some of the markets are actually starting to wake up the last couple of 
days and are starting to understand the malfeasance, the economic 
malfeasance, of this place.
  But then again, I sometimes wonder: Do I work with a bunch of people 
who don't own a calculator or didn't show up to their high school 
economics class?
  Because this isn't that complicated.
  We use big, fancy words. We do brilliant virtue signaling. But the 
math is brutal, and I think we need to wake up when we saw what the 
President did, what was it, on ``60 Minutes'' a couple of days ago. It 
was a complete disconnect from what is happening to the middle class 
and the poor going on in this country.
  So let's actually use a few boards here just to try to provide some 
textual facts to how this all works.

[[Page H8000]]

  Now, I am just trying to make a point, and this is for myself. I 
represent the Phoenix-Scottsdale area. Now we have the highest 
inflation in the Nation. So maybe if you are in a community that, hey, 
you only had 7 percent, my folks are breaking 13.
  Try being a working family that is trying to survive in a world where 
your purchasing power lost 13 percent and your rents are still going 
up. Rents are eventually going to come down when the Federal Reserve 
has started to break the back of employment. That may be as much as 18 
months away. We are finally starting to see our home prices start to 
tip a bit because a Firstrust first mortgage these days is now well 
over 6 percent if it is a conforming loan.
  But it is fascinating. It is also the communities that have had some 
of the greatest economic prosperity because there are people moving 
there who also seem to be suffering the highest inflation.
  Mr. Speaker, let us start to actually look at some of the drivers. 
This is July 21 to July 22.
  Okay, energy, hey, it is 2.7 percent of that inflation. But start to 
add in shelter, start to add in energy, and start to add in--and come 
back up here and all the other things, and this is the stuff right 
here, this, this, and food, just skip the energy portion, and that is 
how we are making the argument. You saw it in the CPI data this last 
week. It is now structural. It is now structural.

  At some point, if I lose my mind, I am going to talk about what 
happens now that the U.S. dollar is going up.
  Remember, why is the U.S. dollar now starting to go up?
  I know we are geeking out.
  Our interest rates are going up. If you are in a country over here, 
you can say, Hey, I can put money into a U.S. dollar-denominated bond 
and get this high interest rate. I am going to pull my money out of 
this country and put it over here.
  Okay. So now there is a hunger to convert to dollars raising the 
value of the dollar.
  Okay. Do you understand we are now exporting our inflation around the 
world? So the crappy economics this place did, now you are kicking the 
rest of the world's head in.
  So we also talk about how much we care about the poor and how much we 
care about the poor around the world.
  Does anyone understand here when we blow up our own economics, we 
export our bad policy?
  It is very much like when we did the tax reform at the very end of 
2017, because we did so many things right and boosted economic growth 
so substantially and GDP growth, and we lowered income inequality and 
all these good things were happening here in the United States, the 
World Bank actually raised worldwide GDP projections because when we 
got our economics right, the rest of the world actually got less poor.
  Well, now you are seeing the other side of the coin, Mr. Speaker. 
When we get our economics wrong, we also export misery.
  Mr. Speaker, some of these charts you have all seen before. I have 
had them here on the floor, and it is just basically trying to show 
what has happened. Just look at this line here. This is functionally 
what is happening to your ability to afford things. And you will notice 
it happened, functionally, almost the day this place had unified 
leftist control, when the Democrats took control of the White House, 
already had control of the Senate and the House of Representatives, and 
they pushed through their policies. You can almost see, hey, policies 
change, and, yes, look at the time of the pandemic, but at least when 
it came to your purchasing power and your ability to survive, it was 
fairly stable.
  This line coming down here, do you see that collapse?
  That is thanks to you for Democrat policies.
  We have been trying it. If anyone has a suggestion on a better way we 
could do this, I am trying to visually come up with some way because we 
are often engaged in sort of a malpractice here. We use big, fancy 
words. We talk about, well, I have 13 percent inflation in my Phoenix 
market.
  I have been trying to find a way to describe what that actually means 
to a working family. So that is where we came up with this concept of 
saying: Do you realize how many days of your labor you have lost?
  And then we have tried doing it where you also adjust it for what the 
gasoline prices are.
  How many days of labor do you lose for higher gasoline prices?
  If anyone has a suggestion how graphically we can sort of show, here 
is the labor you lost just because of higher fuel prices. But here is 
the labor you lost just because of what has happened.
  In my area it is air-conditioning prices. In your area, Mr. Speaker, 
it might be heating. We are going to have a fun winter for those of you 
who don't live in the desert.
  But also our core inflation, we have been trying to do things like 
show a calendar.
  Is there another way you can help the American people understand the 
stress they are feeling?
  What is the old saying?
  There is a lot more month left instead of cash at the end of the 
month?
  It is real, and it is pervasive.
  There also needs to be an understanding. The inflation that this 
place set off this last year will be part of our economics for a decade 
or two.
  So, Mr. Speaker, if you are the person thinking about retiring a 
decade from now, I sure hope you are re-looking at everything you need 
and how many dollars you have to set aside.
  What is your housing? What is your healthcare?
  Because you have got to also understand there are some inputs here. 
So let's say the mean inflation in the country is 8, 9 percent. 
Healthcare in the country is functionally running double that.
  Mr. Speaker, are you ready to have your copay on your future 
healthcare be doubled what it is today?
  Because that is what is coming at you. So, yes, the Democrats have 
pushed a subsidy bill on drug prices, but that doesn't cover the fact 
that inflation is about to come and kick your head in. And, once again, 
it is also reaching into the general fund, putting it over here. We are 
going to borrow the money; we are going to try to find some way to tax 
it from you or tax it from my kids.
  You know the world has changed, Mr. Speaker. Let's see if I can 
actually find some of these to make it a little easier.
  But you start to realize when even the left-wing talking head 
Democrat apologists who hold economics degrees are basically standing 
up and talking about the misery the Democrat policies have brought to 
this country.
  So let's see. We have Jason Furman.
  How many of us have ever seen Jason Furman say a single nice thing 
about a Republican?
  Of course not. He basically makes his living berating those of us on 
the right and basically defending Democrat policies.
  The math has gotten so ugly he can no longer defend what Democrats 
have done to people in this country. The medium CPI excludes all of the 
large changes in either direction and is a better predictor of labor 
market slack.

  Now, this is important, where I'm trying to get here. Jason Furman is 
basically trying to help us understand that we are busting through a 
9.5 percent annual rate in August, which is the single highest monthly 
print in the datasets which started in 1983. I don't mean this to be 
disjointed. I want it to sort of become crisp. The core of inflation is 
functionally higher than any time it has been published since 1983.
  Mr. Speaker, how old were you in 1983?
  Do you remember the level of misery?
  Congratulations. This is what the policies around this place did.
  And then you get a clown who says, Oh, it is Ukraine. It is this and 
that.
  No, it is not. This stuff was in the futures market long before.
  Mr. Speaker, do you remember a year ago September when the futures 
markets in energies and those things were blowing off the charts?
  That was telling you this was coming.
  But that would require some economic literacy.
  Look, I accept some of this is geeking out when you start to try to 
do CPI and core CPI.
  The simple point of a chart like this is it is not like, hey, we had 
this huge fluctuation of fuel prices, but everything else was fairly 
normal.
  Sorry. It is not.

[[Page H8001]]

  This is my Phoenix area.

                              {time}  1530

  When you start to realize that my folks are living with over 13 
percent, it might be a reason why a lot of us from the West are 
incredibly cranky because we are just now getting the announcements of 
how much our electricity is going to be going up.
  For the rest of you in the country--you know, we are about to hit our 
lovely time of the year when the temperature comes down, and we are not 
running our air conditioners. You are all getting ready to turn on your 
heat.
  Have all of you in the colder States, have you started to budget your 
money for what is about to hit you in your heating bills? For my 
brothers and sisters on the left, you better hope that it doesn't get 
cold before the election day before your folks start to see their power 
bills.
  Just sort of making the point--food prices continue to increase with 
food at home having the largest annual increase since the end of the 
1970s. I was in high school in the late 1970s--I am willing to admit 
it--and fashion was pretty horrible and inflation was worse.
  I remember watching my President get up on television, wearing a 
sweater, explaining that we were going to have to live poorer. I 
remember this old guy running for President, who was actually 
optimistic, saying, hey, if we open up our reserves and natural gas and 
those things, we will live better.
  That was also one of the great ironies that I think the oldest 
candidate running for President, Ronald Reagan, had the biggest portion 
of young people voting for him. It was because of optimism.
  I desperately want to get behind this microphone and demonstrate 
optimism. I have a 7-year-old and an 11-week-old--at my age--that is 
being pathologically optimistic. I want my little boy and my little 
girl to have an amazing American life. The American dream is not some 
sort of piece of rhetoric to me, it is what we are structurally; it is 
a gift we are given. The math is horrendous.
  My 11-week-old son--that just came to us as a surprise--in 30 years, 
he is entering sort of the beginning of his peak earning years, and the 
United States will have--on today's dollars and today's math, without 
inflation calculated in it--this is from CBO a couple weeks ago, and 
they had not put long-term inflation into the math--$128 trillion of 
borrowed money in today's dollars. That is $128 trillion borrowed money 
in today's dollars.
  So, of course, this place is fixated on how we are going to save that 
next generation and how we are going to create economic prosperity and 
economic growth because growth is moral.
  Oh, sorry, I take that back. It is moral to some of us. Control, 
power, voting out $4 trillion of borrowing since this White House and 
since this unified Democrat government--with a stunning amount of that 
money being transferred in subsidies to people that vote for them--and 
they don't demonstrate even a hoot of caring for survival of people who 
are going to be in retirement. And for these young people, that is 
another Congress' problem.
  If this place had a soul, we would be fixated day after day on what 
we are going to do to make more stuff to bend inflation so the Federal 
Reserve doesn't have to break the back of people's lives. Of a future 
where instead of having the debate of--hey, ObamaCare, let's subsidize 
things more, the Republican alternative, which was also a subsidy bill. 
Screw that.
  Why don't we do something that is rational? Maybe we should change 
the price of healthcare, adopt technology, cure things. Look, I have 
done dozens of presentations here on the economics of cures, the 
economics of technology disruptions in healthcare. Yes, it means you 
have to say ``no'' to armies of lobbyists.
  It is also the only mathematical way I can find you save this place, 
save this country, save this experiment, save little boy's economic 
future, my little girl's future. We are not going to do it, because it 
doesn't hand huge amounts of power and control to the left.
  It is not a check from government to someone that is going to turn 
around and write one political party a check. It is that cynical. What 
do we do? We are going to watch cable television for a couple days, 
complain about 50 migrants who illegally crossed into the country 
showing up in Martha's Vineyard because that is easy to understand and 
it is good television.
  The same day--you got how much poorer that day because of inflation. 
You got that much closer to Social Security having no money left in the 
trust fund. That $128 trillion I just mentioned to you, every dime from 
the $30 trillion borrowing we are at today to the $128 trillion--the 
model says every dime of that increased borrowing--75 percent is 
Medicare, 25 percent is Social Security, and the rest of the budget is 
in balance.
  Okay. The problem is right in front of us. Let's do something bold 
and fix Social Security. Except the Social Security proposals around 
her are absurd. There are some things we can do where you don't do 
taxes in a mechanism where you actually slow the economy down, and 
therefore, lose much of the economic growth you were trying to fix to 
be able to have revenues in FICA.
  Then the revolution I have talked about so many times here on the 
floor of disruption of cure diseases. I don't mean this to sound like a 
non sequitur, but it ties in. Diabetes is basically a third of all 
healthcare spending. Type 2 is really complex, some genetic, a lot of 
it lifestyle, but we help fund it through how we do the farm bill and 
other things.
  We know there has been a breakthrough, it is only like a half a dozen 
people, and it is very short-term, so we don't have the longer 
latitudinal data, who have been cured of type 1.
  Think about the hundreds of billions of dollars this place basically 
was handing out--that we all know we are going to be here a year or two 
from now holding hearings on how much was stolen, wasted, handed out to 
political cronies, and favoritism. Could you imagine if we took a 
fraction of those dollars, and said: Well, diabetes is 31 percent of 
all Medicare spending, it is 33 percent of all healthcare spending, 
maybe having the revolution of a cure there--really hard.

  Oh, by the way, it is also the single biggest thing you can do for 
U.S. sovereign debt and the future economic growth of the country. It 
turns out when we look at poverty--the number of our brothers and 
sisters who are really below the poverty line--I have some Members hear 
that say, oh, it is racism. Oh, it is education.
  It turns out health may be the number one component. Grandma just had 
her foot cut off because of diabetes. What does that do to the entire 
family structure's ability to participate in the economy? Maybe the 
moral discussion--I represent a Tribal community that has the second 
highest per capita diabetes in the world. Number one is right down the 
street; it is the sister Tribe.
  If you actually cared--having the disruptive conversation of, screw 
it, we are going to find a way to have this health revolution because 
it is great economics. It is also moral. It is compassionate. It is 
loving. And saying that we are going to build one more clinic--we are 
going to build more clinics. That is compassion? We are going to help 
teach you how to live with your misery when there is a path for a cure?
  It is just that optimism that should be part of the ethos of what we 
are. Maybe it doesn't raise us political money. Maybe it is not good 
campaigns. Maybe it is beyond our intellectual comprehension around 
here. God knows, the intellectual gravitas of this place has just 
almost become trite when you hear the debates and discussions we have 
on the floor.
  The economics are sound. The compassion is noble. And it is actually 
the right thing to do. Yet, I can't tell you--I have been doing this 
for a few years now--the poor staff here who has had to listen to these 
speeches and watch me hold up these boards and then try to scribe it 
down--which I apologize when I do the machine gun talking.
  There is a path here. I am trying to find a couple of the slides that 
are just terrifying me right now. I accept the media--excuse me, the 
Democrat propagandas--media, same thing--don't want to talk about 
inflation and what it does to people. Don't want to talk to what it 
does to retirees and young couples and those things because it is not 
going to help their friends win.
  But maybe understanding it--maybe actually having it be written about 
in

[[Page H8002]]

a moral aspect, a moral discussion of what we are doing to working 
families in this country might actually get some of us off our heinies 
to come here and do things, saying, hey, you do realize there is policy 
we can engage in.
  Naming a piece of legislation the Inflation Reduction Act, when it 
does no such thing. When it comes back being scored as, hey, you know, 
several years from now it is still borrowing money. The way the 
Democrats were scoring, saying, well, we get inflation reduction by 
taxing people and yanking money out of the economy by lowering 
productivity and taking their money away. Oh, by the way, all the 
savings ended in the future years, and it is all gimmicks.
  That is not me talking. That is actually liberal groups that were 
scoring the bill that were outraged on the fake economics. You start 
looking at this growing divergence, the split of inflation in metro 
areas and other parts of the country.
  San Francisco where you now have people abandoning it has only about 
5.7 percent inflation. Where they are coming to, places like my 
community, I am busting through 13. Can you see why I'm concerned?
  I am looking for a chart. My fear is I don't have it here, it may be 
in the piles over there.
  There was data out about 10 days ago talking about productivity. Now 
who knows what productivity is?
  Okay. The way they do the model, you know, the people that score 
this, they basically say, hey, we have this many workers and those 
workers produce this many units of production. Okay. And we have been 
doing this modeling for a very long time. It is really good for the 
economy when a worker actually produces more every day than they did 
the day before. That is not just because, hey, they made the production 
line go faster, it is because we got the tax code, right, so they did 
investments.
  One of the amazing things that happened after the 2017 tax reform is 
we did something called expensing it. Now, part of that expensing you 
actually got to take--I am going to geek out--the last quarter of 2017. 
So that is why there is this sudden lift in the end of 2017, even 
before the tax reform was done because we did something 
retrospectively.
  Then the next couple years, boom, you saw all this capital coming 
back in from the rest of the world because we fixed the international 
repatriation incentives to bring money back to the country. Then we 
said, if you go buy a piece of equipment that will make you faster, 
better, cleaner, more productive, we are going to let you--instead of 
depreciating it over the next decade, we are going to let you take it 
on day one.
  Yes, we take a big hit today on tax receipts, but--eventually that 
was going to happen on the tax receipts, it just happens over a longer 
time, but we take it today--here is the catch, we get a sudden pop of 
productivity. So there is more economic activity and that new step up 
in activity means we get more tax revenues in the next couple years.

                              {time}  1545

  Guess what happened in speech after speech of our brothers and 
sisters on the left? This is a giveaway to the rich. It is a giveaway 
to the big corporations. I have quotes from a half dozen Members, 
senior Democrat Members here, who told us we were going to go into 
depression because of what the Republicans did in tax reform.
  Guess what happened? Within a year, the poor started getting less 
poor. The middle class got much more prosperous. Income inequality 
started to shrink. Food insecurity shrank. Corporate tax receipts grew.
  How is that possible? Because it turns out that getting the tax and 
regulatory code meant investment in things that made us more 
productive.
  When you make society more productive, what are the two ways you get 
paid more? Inflation, which just means you are getting compensated for 
really bad public policy. The dollar is worth less, so we are going to 
pay you more so you just hold even. When your paycheck goes up for 
inflation, you didn't gain anything.
  The other thing economics tells you is you pay people more because 
they are being more productive, and that productivity is absolutely 
necessary if we are going to survive our demographic curve, if we are 
going to make our promises on Social Security and Medicare.
  You have to understand that all this has to work together. You have 
to do everything from immigration policy to environmental policy to tax 
policy to regulatory policy. You have to get all these things right. 
Instead, we are going just to do the try it around here, and we are 
going to do great virtue signaling.
  Why this board is important is the quarters now where we are starting 
to see Democrat policy kick in, we are having an absolute crash of 
productivity. So, you are saying, but we have all these people working. 
Okay, but the math is the math.
  They may be working, but something is going on out there. Maybe this 
is the phasing out of the expensing, which was part of tax reform. Some 
on our side are trying to make it permanent; Democrats oppose it. But 
this is really bad. You need this to look very different.
  Even if you just cared about inflation, productivity is one of your 
cures. If you get someone here who says Congress doesn't have 
influence, this is about monetary supply, and it is the Federal 
Reserve, yes, it is.
  My argument is when we pump out spending that is going to require 
borrowing, and the Federal Reserve basically acts like our daddy who 
indemnifies us from really stupid policy and buys up our debt, we are 
functionally creating monetary policy by our profligate spending.
  Instead of putting those dollars into things that change 
productivity, change people's ability to survive and have wealth and 
economically grow and, therefore, bend the inflation curve, we did just 
the opposite. We handed out money at one point to encourage people to 
stay home.
  Somewhere here I think I have the Larry Summers chart. Remember a 
couple of years ago, Larry Summers was, like, an absolute hero of the 
left, great academics, well spoken, well respected, and then he made 
the sin of saying: Please don't do this. Dumping another $1.9 trillion 
on the economy when you are not asking people to either step up their 
skills or actually participate in the economy, please don't do this.
  All of a sudden, the left, as they do because he didn't engage in 
sort of the theater of virtue signaling, turned on him. Oh, he is evil. 
He is bad. Well, it turns out, he was right.
  The amount of misery these crappy economics have created to people in 
this country, the number of people who are poorer--one of the projects 
we are working on in our office is, in a decade, the Social Security 
trust fund runs out of money, 12\1/2\ years. We haven't calculated in 
the inflationary cycle yet. That wasn't part of the trustees' report.
  Let's say this place continues to do what it does, which is nothing, 
and we don't fix it. With the cost of everything being higher, even 
though you have the Social Security COLAs, you have to still pay your 
healthcare copays, which are inflation doubled, at double the rate. You 
may be heading toward doubling the number of senior Americans who are 
in poverty.
  The number of Members here who are getting behind the microphone and 
saying, ``Oh, this is just transitory. It is Putin's tax hike. It is 
the evil oil companies.'' No. It is crappy policy. Larry Summers and 
others told you it was. They told you this was coming. You are trying 
to continue to virtue signal or blame other people.
  Madam Speaker, may I ask how much time remains.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Leger Fernandez). The gentleman has 20 
minutes remaining.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I will do my very best not to use up that time.
  I am not even sure I should do this one to all of you. We will come 
back to that previous one and see if we can make it make more sense.
  Let's see. The left has been in control here for, what are we, about 
18 months? Since President Biden was sworn in, off the top of your 
head, before looking at the slide, how much has been added to the 
deficit? Under unified Democrat control, how much have we borrowed?
  Remember, you have a President who almost gleefully gets behind a 
microphone and says, I have lowered. Well,

[[Page H8003]]

that is because some of the borrowing during the pandemic was insane. 
We borrowed $4.8 trillion, and here are some of the things: the rescue 
plan, the omnibus, you know.
  You start to add in just the growth of spending, and then what is 
fascinating is we are now finally starting to see some of these charts 
that have interest. It is one of the reasons I wanted to touch on that.
  You do realize our borrowing costs today have almost doubled. 
Actually, I think they have more than doubled since the day President 
Biden was sworn in.
  There is a model out there that says if you had a 2-point higher 
interest rate on U.S. sovereign debt over--functionally, I think the 
model was 25 years, 2 points higher. We are 2-plus points higher right 
now. But if that were to be sustained for about 25 years, at the end of 
that 25 years, every dime of tax receipts from this government pays 
nothing but interest.

  Now, back to the slide where I was fixated on productivity and 
economic growth. Are you getting the pitch? If we would stop the clown 
show and start to fixate on things that help people--and is helping 
people really Republican or Democrat, because this place isn't doing 
it. We subsidize people. We sure hand out a hell of a lot of checks, 
but almost none of that makes society healthier and more productive.
  There is a path. When you start to see things like this and realize 
when we factor in the new interest rates, the amount of just the 
financing, just the financing on $4.8 trillion of additional borrowing 
we have done in--what?--the last 18 months, when the 2 year today was 
in--what?--3 and a half, still going up.
  Why isn't there a sense of worry around here? I mean, you all walk 
around with these cell phones. You know, there are calculators on them.
  This was just an attempt--and I know the slide is noisy. We were just 
trying to work in the components of GDPNow. Let's see if I can make 
this make sense.
  If you are crazy enough to have been watching this, there is an app 
you can go to right now and download it from the Atlanta Federal 
Reserve. It is called GDPNow.
  What they try to do is take datasets as they come out, and it is a 
formula. It is pure math. This isn't like the New York Fed, which 
actually does attitudinal things and sort of purchasing attitudes and 
savings attitudes. GDPNow is just cold, hard math.
  This was an attempt to try to show, hey, here are some of the 
components. GDPNow is a real GDP calculator. What is going on, because 
as you know, GDP in the first quarter came in negative, but there were 
genuinely some timing and some energy effects on that one.
  But GDPNow in the second quarter came in negative, and that one was--
well, it looks like it is structural. As of about 2 hours ago, the 
GDPNow web app you can put on your phone--a couple of weeks ago, they 
thought this quarter was going to be about a 2\1/2\ percent growth 
rate, which would have been nice. It sort of meant, hey, the fall of 
economic expansion looks like it had bent and was coming back up.
  As of a couple of hours ago, now it has fallen all the way down to 
0.3 with negative bias, meaning these inputs that the Atlanta Fed is 
using continue to fall.
  I am going to predict we are heading into a third negative GDP 
quarter.
  Now, are we going to have the same argument that we had last quarter? 
Well, technically, two negative quarters is not a recession. 
Technically, we have this little committee over here, and they decide 
if it is a recession. So, we spent a week trying to decide: Should we 
call it a recession? Should we say we are not in a recession?
  My attitude was: Who cares? How about we do something that would be 
much more compassionate? Let's go talk to the family down the street 
that is just trying to survive and ask them how they are doing.
  I am going to get up here and geek out on the components that 
actually go into a GDP calculator. My real request is this place 
functionally start to understand the crappy policies we have made the 
last 18 months.
  We can reverse course. We can do things policy-wise that get economic 
growth, get productivity, produce hydrocarbons, produce the things that 
are components for prosperity, or we can continue to functionally 
export misery, not only throughout our country but throughout the 
world, because that is what we have done.
  Be prepared. In a couple of weeks, you are going to find out we have 
had another quarter of negative growth. We are going to have the press 
and the Democrats say: Oh, but that is not a real definition of 
recession. That is a committee over here. Let's talk about migrants 
being shipped to, you know.
  Instead, we will do everything we can to understand the scale of the 
economic dislocations that policy around here has done in the last year 
and a half.
  Understand, Republicans: We are going to take the majority of this 
House this November. My math, from what I can see policy-wise, even if 
we controlled everything, it is going to take years to fix.
  Remember the opening here? I tried to explain something, and that was 
called the yield curve. When you have an inverted yield curve, what 
does it mean? It is not that complicated.
  My 2-year T bill, I give you money to hold a 2-year Treasury bond, 
full faith and credit of you, the taxpayers, or a 5 year, a 7 year. All 
those are paying higher interest rates than if you bought a 10 year.
  That lets you know the markets now believe inflation is here for 
years and years. The data on these boards now says inflation is here 
for years and years.
  How much policy do you see coming from our brothers and sisters in 
the majority demonstrating they care enough to actually take on the 
misery, or are we just going to engage in the political theater, the 
virtue signaling, to survive the next election cycle?
  Madam Speaker pro tempore, I apologize for the discombobulation of 
not having the boards set up.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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